Dive Brief:
- The Advanced Manufacturing Company of America has raised $300 million in a series B funding round, bringing the startup’s value to $1 billion, according to a press release on Wednesday.
- The funds will allow Amca to “create” and acquire more factories across the country and expand its artificial intelligence-powered platform, Rapid, across its manufacturing network, in a bid to ramp up deliveries of components that are “most essential” to being combat-ready and to fulfill tasks.
- Rapid is used to engineer, qualify and produce components for major platforms, and has recently been deployed for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, as well as commercial widebody and narrowbody aircraft.
Dive Insight:
In addition to acquiring more factories, Amca will “create” its own factories from the ground up when it feels that its existing manufacturers are not best suited for what the industry needs, CEO Jai Malik said during a virtual press conference on Monday.
When it comes to buying a factory, what Amca looks for is whether the facility can deliver parts its team designs and meet the required qualifications to “serve the warfighter” or other major customers, he added.
That includes factories that are AS 9100-certified, a quality management standard for the aerospace, defense and space industries. The AS 9100-certified sites have “compliance processes in place that are critical for the types of parts that we manufacture.”
“They typically have specialized tooling and a workforce that is hungry to see more utilization and more throughput,” Malik said.
The startup raised $76.5 million in initial funding in April 2025 and acquired its first supplier, Electro-Mech Components, in South El Monte, California. In August 2025, Amca acquired Cal-Draulics, an aerospace-engineering-focused supplier of high-precision hydraulic products in Corona, California.
Most recently, Amca bought power electronics supplier BC Systems for its customers’ defense programs. Amca also opened its headquarters in El Segundo, California, which houses its advanced prototyping and testing facility.
To date, the company operates six facilities in California, Iowa and New York, spanning over 123,000 square feet, according to the press release.
Amca was established in 2024 by Malik and COO Eli Giovanetti, the latter of whom previously served as a senior production and engineering leader at SpaceX.
One of the reasons Malik started Amca was to help solve a “critical” supply chain problem, he said during the press conference on Monday. During his time as a general partner at private equity firm Countdown Capital, he noticed many companies focused on developing new defense systems and manufacturing high-volume parts for various programs.
However, he added, no one was focusing on the middle of the supply chain, where there are only one or two suppliers of critical components such as panels, sensors, displays and switches, especially in the United States.
“What I saw firsthand while I was at Countdown was a supply chain problem where one capacity was actively declining,” Malik said. “Company owners and workforces for the components were exiting the market, such as retirements, leading to a bottleneck in production and in sustainment for the most critical systems that our country has.”
Amca combines engineering, qualification testing, technical data package development and certified manufacturing capacity into a single integrated platform business, streamlining operations, according to the press release.
“The simplest way to understand what we’re doing is that we remove the gap between [the] development of components and [the] design of components to production,” Malik said. “We don't just design parts, and we don't just operate factories. We connect the full path from engineering to qualification to certify production, resulting in a lead time for critical components that is significantly faster than the industry standard. In some cases, 70% faster.”
With Amca’s AI-powered platform Rapid, the startup can go from the initial concept of a component’s design needs to the final qualified design and manufacturing workflow within weeks, and in some cases, a few months, Malik said.
This also allows Amca to deliver parts to its major customers, such as BAE Systems, Airbus, Textron, Bombardier, Honeywell and GE Aerospace, 67% faster than the existing supply chain, Malik said.
The series B round was led by Caffeinated Capital and includes “major participation” from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Construct Capital, and House Capital. Some of the investors also backed Anduril, which recently raised $5 billion.
